A Delicate Truth A Novel

3





The sensational arrival of Kit and Suzanna Probyn in the remote North Cornish village of St Pirran did not at first receive the ecstatic welcome that it merited. The weather was foul and the village of a mood to match: a dank February day of dripping sea-mist, and every footstep clanking down the village street like a judgement. Then at evening around pub time, the disturbing news: the gyppos were back. A camper – new, most likely stolen – with an upcountry registration and curtains in the side windows had been sighted by young John Treglowan from his father’s tractor as he drove his cows to milking:

‘They was up there, bold as brass, on Manor parkland, the exact same spot they was last time, proud of that clump of old pines.’

Any brightly coloured washing on the line then, John?

‘In this weather? Not even gyppos.’

Children at all, John?

‘None as I did see, but most likely they was hid away till they knowed the coast was clear.’

Horses then?

‘No horses,’ John Treglowan conceded. ‘Not yet.’

And still only the one camper, then?

‘You wait till tomorrow, and we’ll have half a dozen of the buggers, see if we don’t.’

They duly waited.

And come the following evening were still waiting. A dog had been spotted, but not a gyppo dog, or not to look at, it being a plump yellow Labrador accompanied by a big-striding bloke in a broad mackintosh hat and one of those Driza-Bone raincoats down to his ankles. And the bloke didn’t look any more gyppo than the dog did – with the result that John Treglowan and his two brothers, who had been spoiling to go up there and have a quiet word with them, same as last time, were restrained.

Which was as well, because next morning the camper with its curtains and upcountry registration and yellow Labrador in the back rolled up at the post-office mini-market, and a nicer spoken pair of retired foreigners you couldn’t wish to ask for, according to the postmistress – foreigner being anyone who had the ill taste to come from east of the Tamar river. She didn’t go as far as to declare they were ‘gentry’ but there was a clear hint of quality in her description.

But that don’t solve the question, do it?

Not by a long way, it don’t.

Don’t begin to.

Because what right has anyone to go camping up the Manor in the first place? Who’s given them permission then? The commander’s bone-headed trustees over to Bodmin? Or those shark lawyers up in London? And how about if they’re paying rent then? What would that mean? It would mean another bloody caravan site, and us with two already and can’t fill them, not even when ’tis season.

But as to asking the trespassers themselves: well, that wouldn’t be proper now, would it?

It wasn’t till the camper appeared at Ben Painter’s garage, which does a line in do-it-yourself hardware, and a tall, angular, cheery fellow in his sixties jumped out, that speculation came to an abrupt halt:

‘Now, sir. Would you be Ben, by any chance?’ he begins, leaning forward and downward, Ben being eighty years old and five feet tall on a good day.

‘I’m Ben,’ Ben concedes.

‘Well, I’m Kit. And what I need, Ben, is a pair of man-sized metal-cutters. Sort of chaps that’ll snip through an iron bar this size,’ he explained, making a ring of his finger and thumb.

‘You off to prison then?’ Ben enquires.

‘Well, not just at this moment, Ben, thank you,’ replies the same Kit, with a raucous hah! of a laugh. ‘There’s this giant padlock on the stable door, you see. A real thug of a chap, all rusted up and no key in sight. There’s a place on the key board where it used to hang, but it’s not hanging there any more. And believe you me, there’s nothing more stupid than an empty key-hook,’ he asserts heartily.

‘The stable door down the Manor, you was talking about then, was it?’ says Ben, after prolonged reflection.

‘The very one,’ Kit agrees.

‘Should be full of empty bottles, that stable should, knowing the commander.’

‘Highly likely. And I hope very shortly to be picking up the deposit on them.’

Ben reflects on this too. ‘Deposit’s not allowed no more, deposit isn’t.’

‘Well now, I suppose it isn’t. So what I’ll really be doing is running them down to the bottle bank for recycling, won’t I?’ says Kit patiently.

But this doesn’t satisfy Ben either:

‘Only I don’t think I should be doing that, should I?’ he objects, after another age. ‘Not now you’ve told me what it’s for. Not the Manor. I’d be aiding and abetting. Not unless you own the bloody place.’

To which Kit, with evident reluctance because he doesn’t want to make old Ben look silly, explains that while he personally doesn’t own the Manor, his dear wife Suzanna does.

‘She’s the late commander’s niece, you see, Ben. Spent her absolute happiest childhood years here. Nobody else in the family wanted to take the place on, so the trustees decided to let us have a go.’

Ben absorbs this.

‘She a Cardew, then, is she? Your wife?’

‘Well, she was, Ben. She’s a Probyn now. Been a Probyn for thirty-three glorious years, I’m proud to say.’

‘She Suzanna, then? Suzanna Cardew as rode the hunt when she were nine year old? Got out in front of the Master, had to have her horse hauled back by the Field Master.’

‘That sounds like Suzanna.’

‘Well I’m buggered,’ says Ben.

A couple of days later an official letter arrived at the post office that put paid to any lingering suspicions. It was addressed not to any old Probyn but to Sir Christopher Probyn, who, according to John Treglowan, who’d looked him up on the Internet, had been some sort of ambassador or commissioner, was it, to a bunch of islands in the Caribbean that was still supposed to be British, and had a medal to show for it too.


And from that day on, Kit and Suzanna, as they insisted on being called, could do no wrong, even if the levellers in the village would have wished it different. Where the commander in his later years was remembered as a lonely, misanthropic drunk, the Manor’s new incumbents threw themselves on village life with such zest and goodwill as even the sourest couldn’t deny. It didn’t matter that Kit was practically rebuilding the Manor single-handed: come Fridays, he’d be down at Community House with an apron round his waist, serving suppers at Seniors’ Stake-Nite and staying for the washing-up. And Suzanna, who they say is ill but you wouldn’t know it, like as not helping out with the Busy Bees or sorting church accounts with Vicar after the treasurer went and died, or down Primary School for the Sure Starters’ concert, or up Church Hall to help set up for Farmers’ Market, or delivering deprived city kids to their country hosts for a week’s holiday away from the Smoke, or running somebody’s wife to the Treliske in Truro to see her sick husband. And stuck-up? – forget it, she was just like you and me, ladyship or not.

Or if Kit was out shopping and spotted you across the street, it was a pound to a penny he’d be bounding towards you between the traffic with his arm up, needing to know how your daughter was enjoying her gap year or how your wife was doing after her dad passed away – warm-hearted to a fault, he was, no side to him either, and never forgets a name. As for Emily, their daughter, who’s a doctor up in London, though you wouldn’t think it to look at her: well, whenever she came down she brought the sunshine with her, ask John Treglowan, who goes into a swoon every time he sees her, dreaming up all the aches and pains he hasn’t got, just to have her cure them for him! Well, a cat may look at a queen, they do say.

So it came as no surprise to anybody, except possibly Kit himself, when Sir Christopher Probyn of the Manor was paid the unprecedented, the unique honour, of becoming the first non-Cornishman ever to be elected Official Opener and Lord of Misrule for Master Bailey’s Annual Fayre, held by ancient rite in Bailey’s Meadow in the village of St Pirran on the first Sunday after Easter.


‘Funky but not over the top is Mrs Marlow’s advice,’ said Suzanna, busying herself in front of the cheval mirror and talking through the open doorway to Kit’s dressing room. ‘We’re to preserve our dignity, whatever that’s supposed to mean.’

‘So not my grass skirt,’ Kit called back in disappointment. ‘Still, Mrs Marlow knows best,’ he added resignedly, Mrs Marlow being their elderly, part-time housekeeper, inherited from the commander.

‘And remember you’re not just today’s Opener,’ Suzanna warned, giving a last affirmative tug at her stock. ‘You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny. But not too funny. And none of your blue jokes. There’ll be Methodists present.’

The dressing room was the one part of the Manor Kit had vowed never to lay his do-it-yourself fingers on. He loved its faded Victorian wallpaper, the clunky antique writing desk set in its own alcove, the worn sash window looking out over the orchard. And today, oh gladness, the aged pear and apple trees were in blossom, thanks to some timely pruning by Mrs Marlow’s husband, Albert.

Not that Kit had just stepped into the commander’s shoes. He had added bits of himself too. On the fruitwood tallboy stood a statuette of the victorious Duke of Wellington gloating over a crouching Napoleon in a sulk: bought in a Paris flea market on Kit’s first foreign tour. On the wall hung a print of a Cossack musketeer shoving a pike down the throat of an Ottoman janissary: Ankara, First Secretary, Commercial.

Yanking open his wardrobe in search of whatever was funky but not over the top, he let his eye wander over other relics of his diplomatic past.

My black morning coat and spongebag trousers? They’d think I was a bloody undertaker.

Dinner tails? Head waiter. And in this heat daft, for the day against all prediction had dawned cloudless and radiant. He gave an ecstatic bellow:

‘Eureka!’

‘You’re not in the bath, are you, Probyn?’

‘Drowning, waving, the lot!’

A yellowing straw boater from his Cambridge years has caught his eye and, hanging beneath it, a striped blazer of the same period: perfect for my Brideshead look. An ancient pair of white ducks will complete the ensemble. And for that touch of foppery, his antique walking stick with scrolled silver handle, a recent acquisition. With knighthood, he had discovered a harmless thing about walking sticks. No trip to London was complete without a visit to the emporium of Mr James Smith of New Oxford Street. And finally – whoopee! – the fluorescent socks that Emily had given him for Christmas.

‘Em? Where is that girl? Emily, I require your best teddy bear immediately!’

‘Out running with Sheba,’ Suzanna reminded him from the bedroom.

Sheba, their yellow Labrador. Shared their last posting with them.

He returned to the wardrobe. To set off the fluorescent socks he would risk the orange suede loafers he’d bought in Bodmin at a summer sale. He tried them on and let out a yip. What the hell? He’d be out of them by tea time. He selected an outrageous tie, squeezed himself into the blazer, clapped on the boater at a rakish angle and did his Brideshead voice:

‘I say, Suki, darling, do ya happen to remember where I put m’ bally speech notes?’ – posing hand on hip in the doorway like all the best dandies. Then stopped, and lowered his arms to his sides in awe. ‘Mother of pearl. Suki, darling. Hallelujah!’

Suzanna was standing before the cheval mirror, scrutinizing herself over her shoulder. She was wearing her late aunt’s black riding habit and boots, and the white lace blouse with its stock for a collar. She had pulled her strict grey hair into a bun and fixed it with a silver comb. On top of it she had set a shiny black topper that should have been ridiculous but to Kit was utterly disarming. The clothes fitted her, the period fitted her, the topper fitted her. She was a handsome, sixty-year-old Cornishwoman of her time, and the time was a hundred years ago. Best of all, you’d think she’d never had a day’s illness in her life.

Pretending to be unsure whether it was permitted to advance further, Kit made a show of hovering in the doorway.

‘You are going to enjoy it, aren’t you, Kit?’ Suzanna said severely into the mirror. ‘I don’t want to think of you going through the motions just to please me.’

‘Of course I’m going to enjoy it, darling. It’ll be a hoot.’

And he meant it. If it would have made old Suki happy, he’d have put on a tutu and jumped out of a cake. They’d lived his life and now they would live hers, if it killed him. Taking her hand, he raised it reverently to his lips, then lifted it aloft as if he were about to dance a minuet with her before escorting her across the dust sheets, down the staircase to the hall, where Mrs Marlow stood clutching two posies of fresh violets, Master Bailey’s flower of choice, one each.

And standing tall beside her, dressed in Chaplinesque rags, safety pins and battered bowler hat, their peerless daughter, Emily, recently returned to life after a disastrous love affair.

‘You all right there, Mum?’ she asked briskly. ‘Got your make-me-betters?’

Sparing Suzanna a reply, Kit gives a reassuring pat to his blazer pocket.

‘And the squeezer, for in case?’

Pats the other pocket.

‘Nervous, Dad?’

‘Terrified.’

‘So you should be.’

The Manor gates stand open. Kit has pressure-washed the stone lions on the gateposts for the occasion. Costumed pleasure-seekers are already drifting up Market Street. Emily spots the local doctor and his wife, and nimbly attaches herself to them, leaving her parents to process alone, Kit comically doffing his straw boater to left and right and Suzanna managing a sporting shot at the royal wave as they confer their praises in their separate ways:

‘Gosh, Peggy darling, that’s so absolutely charming! Wherever did you get such lovely satin from?’ Suzanna exclaims to the postmistress.

‘Well f*ck me, Billy. Who else have you got under there?’ murmurs Kit, sotto voce, into the ear of portly Mr Olds, the butcher, who has come as a turbanned Arab prince.

In the gardens of the cottages, daffodils, tulips, forsythia and peach blossom raise their heads to the blue sky. From the church tower flies the black-and-white flag of Cornwall. A bevy of equestrian children in hard hats comes trotting down the street, escorted by the redoubtable Polly from the Granary Riding School. The festivities are too much for the lead pony and it shies, but Polly is on hand to grab the bridle. Suzanna consoles the pony, then its rider. Kit takes Suzanna’s arm and feels her heart beating as she presses his hand lovingly against her ribs.

It’s here and now, Kit thinks, as the elation rises in him. The jostling crowds, the palominos cavorting in the meadows, the sheep safely grazing on the hillside, even the new bungalows that deface the lower slopes of Bailey’s Hill: if this isn’t the land they have loved and served for so long, where is? And all right, it’s Merrie bloody England, it’s Laura bloody Ashley, it’s ale and pasties and yo-ho for Cornwall, and tomorrow morning all these nice, sweet people will be back at each other’s throats, screwing each other’s wives and doing all the stuff the rest of the world does. But right now it’s their National Day, and who’s an ex-diplomat of all people to complain if the wrapping is prettier than what’s inside?

At a trestle table stands Jack Painter, red-headed son of Ben from the garage, in braces and a Stetson. Beside him sits a girl in a fairy dress with wings, selling tickets at four pounds a shot.

‘You’re free, Kit, dammit!’ Jack cries boisterously. ‘You’re the bloody Opener, man, same as Suzanna!’

But Kit in his exultation will have none of it:

‘I am not free, thank you, Jack Painter! I am extremely expensive. And so is my dear wife,’ he retorts and, happy man that he is, slaps down a ten-pound note and drops the two pounds change into the animal-welfare box.

A hay cart awaits them. A beribboned ladder is lashed against it. Suzanna grips it with one hand, her riding skirts in the other, and with Kit’s help ascends. Willing arms reach out to receive her. She waits for her breathing to calm down. It does. She smiles. Harry Tregenza, The Builder You Can Trust and celebrated rogue, wears an executioner’s mask and brandishes a silver-painted wooden scythe. He is flanked by his wife wearing bunny ears. Next to them stands this year’s Bailey Queen, bursting out of her corsage. Tipping his boater, Kit plants chivalrous kisses on the cheeks of both women and inhales from each the same waft of jasmine scent.

An ancient hurdy-gurdy is playing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’. Smiling energetically, he waits for the din to subside. It doesn’t. He flaps an arm for silence, smiles harder. In vain. From an inside pocket of his blazer he extracts the speech notes that Suzanna has nobly typed for him, and waves them. A steam engine emits a truculent shriek. He mimes a theatrical sigh, appeals to the heavens for sympathy, then to the crowd beneath him, but the din refuses to let up.

He goes for it.

First he must bawl out what he amusingly calls the Church Notices, though they concern such non-ecclesiastical matters as toilets, parking and baby-changing. Does anyone hear him? Judging by the faces of the listeners hanging around the foot of the hay cart, they don’t. He names our selfless volunteers who have laboured night and day to make the miracle happen, and invites them to identify themselves. He might as well be reading out the names of the Glorious Dead. The hurdy-gurdy has gone back to the beginning. You’re Master of Misrule too. They’ll expect you to be funny. A quick check of Suki: no bad signs. And Emily, his beloved Em: tall and watchful, standing, as ever, a little apart from the pack.

‘And lastly, my friends, before I step down – though I’d better be jolly careful when I do!’ – zero response – ‘it’s my pleasure, and my very happy duty, to urge you to spend your hard-earned money unwisely, flirt recklessly with one another’s wives’ – wished he hadn’t said that – ‘drink, eat and revel the day away. So hip hip’ – tearing off his boater and thrusting it in the air – ‘hip hip!’

Suzanna raises her topper to join his boater. The Builder You Wouldn’t Trust Further Than You Could Throw Him can’t raise his executioner’s mask, so punches the air with his clenched fist in an unintended communist salute. A long-delayed Hooray! tears through the loudspeakers like an electrical fault. To murmurs of ‘Good on you, my handsome!’ and ‘Proper job, my robin!’, Kit clambers gratefully down the ladder, lets his walking stick fall to the ground and reaches up to take hold of Suzanna by the hips.

‘Bloody wonderful, Dad!’ Emily declares, appearing at Kit’s side with the walking stick. ‘Want a sit-down, Mum, or flog on?’ – using a family expression.

Suzanna, as ever, wants to flog on.


The royal tour of Our Opener and His Lady Wife begins. First, inspect shire horses. Suzanna the born country girl chats to them, strokes and pats their rumps without inhibition. Kit makes a show of admiring their brasses. Home-grown vegetables in their Sunday best. Cauliflowers that the locals call broccoli: bigger than footballs, washed clean as a pin. Home-made breads, cheeses and honey.

Sample piccalilli: tasteless but keep grinning. Smoked salmon pâté excellent. Urge Suki to buy some. She does. Linger over Gardening Club’s floral celebration. Suzanna knows every flower by its first name. Bump into MacIntyres, two of life’s dissatisfied customers. Ex-tea-planter George keeps a loaded rifle at his bedside for the day the masses assemble at his gates. His wife, Lydia, bores for the village. Advance on them with outstretched arms:

‘George! Lydia! Darlings! Marvellous! Super dinner at your house the other night, really one of those evenings. Our turn next time!’

Move gratefully to our bygone threshing machines and steam engines. Suzanna undaunted by stampede of children dressed as anything from Batman to Osama. Kit yells at Gerry Pertwee, village Romeo, squatting up on his tractor in Red Indian headdress:

‘For the umpteenth time, Gerry, when are you going to mow our bloody paddock?’ And to Suzanna, aside: ‘Damned if I’ll pay the bugger fifteen quid an hour when the going rate’s twelve.’

Suzanna waylaid by Marjory, rich divorcee on the prowl. Marjory has set her sights on the dilapidated greenhouses in the walled garden of the Manor for her Orchid Club, but Suzanna suspects it’s Kit she’s set her sights on. Kit the diplomat rides to the rescue:

‘Suki darling, hate to interrupt – Marjory, you’re looking extremely dishy, if I may say so – small drama, darling. You alone have the power to solve.’

Cyril, church warden and lead tenor in the choir, lives with mother, banned from unsupervised contact with schoolchildren; Harold, drunk dentist, early retirement, pretty thatched cottage off the Bodmin road, one son in rehab, wife in the bin. Kit greets them all lavishly, sets course for Arts and Crafts Expo, Suki’s brainchild.

Marquee a haven of quiet. Admire amateur watercolours. Forget the quality, endeavour is all. Proceed to other end of marquee, descend grassy knoll.

Straw boater cutting ridge in forehead. Suede loafers giving him hell as predicted. Emily at edge of frame, keeping a quiet eye on Suzanna.

Enter roped-off enclosure of our Rustic Crafts section.


Does Kit feel a first chill on entering here, a presence, an intimation? Does he hell: he’s in Eden, and he intends to remain there. He’s experiencing one of those rare sensations of pure pleasure when everything seems to have come right. He’s gazing with unbounded love on his wife in her riding rig and topper. He’s thinking of Emily, and how even a month ago she was still inconsolable, and today she’s right back on her feet and ready to take on the world.

And while his thoughts are contentedly drifting in this way, so is his gaze, which has fixed itself on the furthest limits of the enclosure and, seemingly of its own accord, on the figure of a man.

A hunched man.

A small hunched man.

Whether permanently hunched or merely at that moment hunched is thus far unknown. The man is hunched, and he is either squatting or sitting on the tailgate of his traveller’s van. Oblivious to the midday heat, he is wearing a shiny, full-length, brown leather coat with the collar up. And for a hat, a broad-brimmed affair, also of leather, with a shallow crown and a bow at the front, less a cowboy’s hat than a Puritan’s.

The features, what Kit can make of them in the shadow of the brim, are emphatically those of a small white male in middle life.

Emphatically?

Why the emphasis suddenly?

What was so emphatic about him?

Nothing.

The fellow was exotic, true. And small. In burly company, the small stand out. That doesn’t make him special. It simply makes you notice him.

A tinker was Kit’s first determinedly light-hearted thought: whenever did he last see a real tinker? Romania fifteen years back, when he was doing a stint in Bucharest. He may actually have turned to Suzanna to suggest this. Or perhaps he only thought of turning to her, because by now he had transferred his interest to the fellow’s utility van, which was not only his workplace but his humble home – witness the Primus stove, bunk bed and rows of pots and cooking implements mingling with the craftsman’s pliers, gimlets and hammers; and on one wall, desiccated animal skins that presumably served him as carpets when, his day’s work done, he gratefully closed his door on the world. But everything so orderly and shipshape that you felt its owner could put his hand to any part of it blindfold. He was that kind of little fellow. Adept. Foot-sure.

But positive, irrevocable recognition at this stage? Certainly not.

There was the creeping, insidious intimation.

There was a coming together of certain fragments of recollection that shuffled themselves around like pieces in a kaleidoscope until they formed a pattern, vague at first, then – but only by degrees – disturbing.

There was a belated acknowledgement, sounded deep down by the inner man – then gradually, fearfully, and with a sinking heart, accepted by the outer one.

There was also a walking away, physically, though the details remained fuzzy in Kit’s later memory. Chubby Philip Peplow, hedge-fund manager and second-homer, seems to have barged into the picture, attended by his newest squeeze, a six-foot model clad in Pierrot tights. Even with a gale-force storm shaping in his head, Kit didn’t lose his eye for a pretty girl. And it was the six-foot girl in tights who did the talking. Would Kit and Suzanna like to swing by for drinks tonight? It would be fab, open house, seven onwards, come as you are, barbie if it doesn’t piss with rain. To which Kit, overdoing it a bit to compensate for his confused state of mind, heard himself say something like: we’d absolutely love to, six-foot girl, but we’ve got the entire Chain Gang coming to dinner, for our sins – ‘Chain Gang’ being Kit and Suzanna’s home-made term for local dignitaries with a weakness for aldermanic regalia.

Peplow and squeeze then depart and Kit goes back to admiring the tinker’s wares, if that’s what he’s been doing, with the part of his head that still refuses to admit the inadmissible. Suzanna is standing right beside him, also admiring them. He suspects, but isn’t sure, that she’s been admiring them before he has. Admiring, after all, was what they were there to do: admire, move on before you get bogged down, then do some more admiring.

Except that this time they weren’t moving on. They were standing side by side and admiring, but also recognizing – Kit recognizing, that is – that the man wasn’t a tinker at all, and never had been. And why the devil he had ever rushed to cast him as a tinker was anyone’s guess.

The fellow was a bloody saddler, for Christ’s sake! What’s the matter with me? He makes saddles, blast him, bridles! Briefcases! Satchels! Purses, wallets, ladies’ handbags, coasters! Not pots and pans at all, he never had! Everything around the man was in leather. He was a leather man advertising his product. He was modelling it. The tailgate of his van was his catwalk.

All of which Kit had until this moment failed to accept, just as he had failed to accept the totally obvious lettering, hand-daubed in gold print on the van’s side, proclaiming JEB’S LEATHERCRAFT to anyone who had eyes to see it, from fifty, more like a hundred, paces. And beneath it, in smaller letters admittedly but equally legible, the injunction Buy From Van. No phone number, no address, email or otherwise, no surname. Just Jeb and buy from his van. Terse, to the point, unambiguous.

But why had Kit’s otherwise fairly well-regulated instincts gone into anarchic, totally irrational denial? And why did the name Jeb, now that he consented to acknowledge it, strike him as the most outrageous, the most irresponsible breach of the Official Secrets Act that had ever crossed his desk?


Yet it did. Kit’s whole body said it did. His feet said it did. They had gone numb inside his badly fitting loafers. His old Cambridge blazer said it did. It was clinging to his back. In the middle of a heatwave, cold sweat had soaked its way clean through his cotton shirt. Was he in present or past time? It was the same shirt, the same sweat, the same heat in both places: here and now on Bailey’s Meadow to the thump of the hurdy-gurdy, or on a Mediterranean hillside at dead of night to the throb of engines out to sea.

And how do two confiding, darting, brown eyes manage to grow old and wrinkled and lose their lightness of being in the ridiculously short space of three years? For the head had lifted, and not just halfway but all the way back, till the brim of the leather hat cocked itself, leaving the harrowed, bony face beneath it in plain sight – a turn of phrase he suddenly couldn’t get rid of – gaunt cheekbones, resolute jaw, and the brow, too, which was etched by the same web of fine lines that had collected themselves at the corners of his eyes and mouth, drawing them downward in some kind of permanent dismay.

And the eyes themselves, formerly so quick and knowing, seemed to have lost their mobility, because once they had settled on Kit, they showed no sign of shifting but stayed there, fixed on him, so that the only way either man was ever going to break free of the other was if Kit did the breaking; which he duly achieved, but only by turning his whole head to Suzanna and saying, Well, darling, here we are, what a day, eh, what a day! – or something equally fatuous, but also sufficiently untypical of him for a frown of puzzlement to pass across Suzanna’s flushed face.

And this frown has not quite disappeared when he hears the soft Welsh voice he is praying uselessly not to hear:

‘Well, Paul. Quite a coincidence, I will say. Not what either of us was led to expect, was it?’

But though the words came smashing into Kit’s head like so many bullets, Jeb must in reality have spoken them quietly, because Suzanna – either thanks to the imperfections of the little hearing aids she wore under her hair, or to the persistent boom-boom of the fairground – failed to pick them up, preferring to manifest an exaggerated interest in a large handbag with an adjustable shoulder strap. She was peering at Jeb over her bunch of Bailey violets and she was smiling a bit too hard at him and being a bit too sweet and condescending altogether for Kit’s taste, which was actually her shyness at work, but didn’t look like it.

‘Now you’re Jeb himself, are you? The real thing.’

What the hell does she mean, real thing? thought Kit, suddenly outraged. Real as compared to what?

‘You’re not a substitute or a stand-in or anything?’ she went on, exactly as if Kit had put her up to explaining her interest in the fellow.

And Jeb for his part was taking her question very seriously:

‘Well now, I wasn’t christened Jeb, I’ll admit that,’ he replied, directing his gaze away from Kit at last and bestowing it on Suzanna with the same steadfastness. Adding with a loquacity that cut straight to Kit’s heart: ‘But the name they gave me was such a mouthful, frankly, that I decided to do some essential surgery on it. Put it that way.’

But Suzanna was in her asking mode:

‘And where on earth did you find such marvellous leather, Jeb? It’s perfectly beautiful.’

At which Kit, whose mind by now had switched to diplomatic autopilot, announced that he too had been bursting to ask the same question:

‘Yes, indeed, where did you get your splendid leather from, Jeb?’

And there follows a moment where Jeb considers his questioners in turn as if deciding which of them to favour. He settles on Suzanna:

‘Yes, well now, it’s actually Russian reindeer hide, madam,’ he explains, with what to Kit is by now an unbearable deference, as he takes down an animal skin from the wall and spreads it lovingly on his lap. ‘Recovered from the wreck of a Danish brigantine that went down in Plymouth Sound in 1786, they tell me. She was on her way from St Petersburg to Genoa, you see, sheltering from the south-westerly gales. Well, we all know about them, don’t we, down these parts?’ – giving the skin a consoling stroke with one tanned little hand – ‘not that the leather minded, did you? Couple of hundred years of seawater were just what you liked,’ he went on quaintly, as if to a pet. ‘The minerals in the wrapping may have helped too, I dare say.’

But Kit knew that if Jeb was delivering his homily to Suzanna, it was Kit he was talking to, Kit’s bewilderment and frustration and anxiety he was playing on, and – yes, his fear too – galloping fear – though of what precisely he had yet to work out.

‘And you do this for a living, do you, Jeb?’ Suzanna was demanding, overtired and sounding dogmatic in consequence. ‘Full time? You’re not just moonlighting or two-jobbing or studying on the side? This isn’t a hobby, it’s your life. That’s what I want to know.’

Jeb needed to think deeply about these large questions. His small brown eyes turned to Kit for help, dwelt on him, then turned away, disappointed. Finally he heaved a sigh and shook his head like a man at odds with himself.

‘Well, I suppose I did have a couple of alternatives, now I come to think of it,’ he conceded. ‘Martial arts? Well, these days they’re all at it, aren’t they? Close protection, I suppose,’ he suggested after another long stare at Kit. ‘Walking rich kids to school in the mornings. Walking them home evening time. Good money in it, they say. But leather now’ – giving the hide another consoling caress – ‘I’ve always fancied a good-quality leather, same as my dad. Nothing like it, I say. But is it my life? Well, life’s what you’re left with, really’ – with yet another stare at Kit, a harder one.


Suddenly everything had speeded up, everything was heading for disaster. Suzanna’s eyes had turned warning-bright. Fierce dabs of colour had appeared on her cheeks. She was sifting through the men’s wallets at an unhealthy speed on the specious grounds that Kit had a birthday coming up. He had, but not till October. When he reminded her of this, she gave an over-hearty laugh and promised that, if she decided to buy one, she would keep it secret in her bottom drawer.

‘The stitching now, Jeb, is it hand or is it machine?’ she blurted, forgetting all about Kit’s birthday and grabbing impulsively at the shoulder bag that she had first picked up.

‘Hand, ma’am.’

‘And that’s the asking price, is it, sixty pounds? It seems an awful lot.’

Jeb turned to Kit:

‘Best I can do, I’m afraid, Paul,’ he said. ‘Quite a struggle for some of us, not having an index-linked pension and similar.’

Was it hatred that Kit was seeing in Jeb’s eyes? Anger? Despair? And what was Jeb seeing in Kit’s eyes? Mystification? Or the mute appeal not to call him Paul again in Suzanna’s hearing? But Suzanna, whatever she’d heard or hadn’t, had heard enough:

‘Well then, I’ll have it,’ she declared. ‘It’ll be just right for my shopping in Bodmin, won’t it, Kit? It’s roomy and it’s got sensible compartments. Look, it’s even got a little side pocket for my credit card. I think sixty pounds is actually jolly reasonable. Don’t you, Kit? Of course you do!’

Saying which, she performed an act so improbable, so provocative, that it momentarily banished all other preoccupations. She placed her own perfectly serviceable handbag on the table and, as a prelude to digging in it for her money, removed her top hat and shoved it at Jeb to hold. If she’d untied the buttons on her blouse, she could not, in Kit’s inflamed perception, have been more explicit.

‘Look here, I’ll pay for this, don’t be bloody silly,’ he protested, startling not only Suzanna but himself with his vehemence. And to Jeb, who alone appeared unperturbed: ‘Cash, I take it? You deal in cash only’ – like an accusation – ‘no cheques or cards or any of the aids to nature?’

Aids to nature? – what the hell is he blathering about? With fingers that seemed to have joined themselves together at the tips, he picked three twenty-pound notes from his wallet and plonked them on the table:

‘There you are, darling. Present for you. Your Easter egg, one week late. Slot the old bag inside the new one. Of course it’ll go. Here’ – doing it for her, none too gently. ‘Thanks, Jeb. Terrific find. Terrific that you came. Make sure we see you here next year, now.’

Why didn’t the bloody man pick up the money? Why didn’t he smile, nod, say thanks or cheers – do something, like any normal human being, instead of sitting down again and poking at the money with his skinny index finger as if he thought it was fake, or not enough, or dishonourably earned, or whatever the hell he was thinking, back out of sight again under his Puritan hat? And why did Suzanna, by now feverish, stand there grinning idiotically down at him, instead of responding to Kit’s sharp tug at her arm?

‘That’s your other name then, is it, Paul?’ Jeb was enquiring in his calm Welsh voice. ‘Probyn? The one they blasted over the loudspeaker, then. That’s you?’

‘Yes, indeed. But it’s my dear wife here who’s the driving force in these things. I just tag along,’ Kit added, reaching out to retrieve her topper and finding it was still rigid in Jeb’s hand.

‘We met, didn’t we, Paul?’ Jeb said, gazing up at him with an expression that seemed to combine pain and accusation in equal measure. ‘Three years back. Between a rock and a hard place, as they say.’ And when Kit’s gaze darted downward to escape his unflinching stare, there was Jeb’s iron little hand holding the top hat by its brim, so tightly that the nail of his thumb was white. ‘Yes, Paul? You were my red telephone.’

Moved to near-desperation by the sight of Emily, appearing out of nowhere as usual to hover at her mother’s side, Kit summoned the last of the fake conviction left to him:

‘Got the wrong chap there, Jeb. Happens to us all. I look at you, and I don’t recognize you from Adam’ – meeting Jeb’s unrelenting stare. ‘Red telephone not a concept to me, I’m afraid. Paul? – total mystery. But there we are.’

And still somehow keeping up the smile, and even contriving an apologetic laugh as he turned to Suzanna:

‘Darling, we mustn’t linger. Your weavers and potters will never forgive you. Jeb, good to meet you. Very instructive listening. Just sorry about the misunderstanding. My wife’s topper, Jeb. Not for sale, old boy. Antique value.’

‘Wait.’

Jeb’s hand had relinquished the topper and risen to the parting of his leather overcoat. Kit moved to place himself in front of Suzanna. But the only deadly weapon that emerged in Jeb’s hand was a blue-backed notebook.

‘Forgot to give you your receipt, didn’t I?’ he explained, tut-tutting at his own stupidity. ‘That VAT man would shoot me dead, he would.’

Spreading the notebook on his knee, he selected a page, made sure the carbon was in place and wrote between the lines with a brown military pencil. And when he had finished – and it must have been quite an exhaustive receipt, reckoned by the time it took to write it – he tore off the page, folded it and placed it carefully inside Suzanna’s new shoulder bag.


In the diplomatic world that had until recently claimed Kit and Suzanna as its loyal citizens, a social duty was a social duty.

The weavers had clubbed together to build themselves an old-world handloom? Suzanna must have the loom demonstrated to her, and Kit must buy a square of handwoven cloth, insisting it would be just the thing to keep his computer from wandering all over his desk: never mind this asinine comment made no sense to anyone, least of all to Emily who, never far away, was chatting to a trio of small children. At the pottery stall, Kit takes a turn at the wheel and makes a hash of it, while Suzanna smiles benignly on his endeavours.

Only when these last rites have been performed do Our Opener and His Lady Wife bid their farewells and by silent consent take the footpath that leads under the old railway bridge, along the stream and up to the side entrance to the Manor.

Suzanna had removed her topper. Kit needed to carry it for her. Then he remembered his boater and took that off too, laying the hats brim to brim and carrying them awkwardly at his side, together with his dandy’s silver-handled walking stick. With his other hand he was holding Suzanna’s arm. Emily started to come after them, then thought better of it, calling through cupped hands that she’d see them back at the Manor. It wasn’t till they had entered the seclusion of the railway bridge that Suzanna swung round to face her husband.

‘Who on earth was that man? The one you said you didn’t know. Jeb. The leather man.’

‘Absolutely nobody I know,’ Kit replied firmly, in answer to the question he had been dreading. ‘He’s a total no-go area, I’m afraid. Sorry.’

‘He called you Paul.’

‘He did, and he should be prosecuted for it. I hope he bloody well will be.’

‘Are you Paul? Were you Paul? Why won’t you answer me, Kit?’

‘I can’t, that’s why. Darling, you’ve got to drop this. It’s not going to lead anywhere. It can’t.’

‘For security reasons?’

‘Yes.’

‘You told him you’d never been anyone’s red telephone.’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘But you have. That time you went away on a hush-hush mission, somewhere warm, and came back with scratches all over your legs. Emily was staying with us while she studied for her tropical-diseases qualification. She wanted you to have a tetanus injection. You refused.’

‘I wasn’t supposed to tell you even that much.’

‘But you did. So it’s no good trying to untell it now. You were going off to be the Office’s red telephone, and you wouldn’t say how long or where it was, except it was warm. We were impressed. We drank to you: “Here’s to our red telephone.” That happened, didn’t it? You’re not going to deny that? And you came back scratched and said you’d fallen into a bush.’

‘I had. I did. A bush. It was true.’

And when this failed to appease her:

‘All right, Suki. All right. Listen. I was Paul. I was his red telephone. Yes, I was. Three years ago. And we were comrades-in-arms. It was the best thing I ever did in my entire career, and that’s all I’m going to tell you ever. The poor chap’s gone completely to pieces. I hardly recognized him.’

‘He looked a good man, Kit.’

‘He’s more than that. He’s a thoroughly decent, brave chap. Or was. I’d no quarrel with him. Quite the reverse. He was my – keeper,’ he said, in a moment of unwelcome honesty.

‘But you denied him all the same.’

‘I had to. No choice. Man was out of court. Whole operation was – well, beyond top secret.’

He had thought the worst was over, but that was to reckon without Suzanna’s grip.

‘What I don’t understand at all, Kit, is this. If Jeb knew you were lying, and you knew you were lying, why did you have to lie to him at all? Or were you just lying for me and Emily?’

She had done it, whatever it was. Seizing upon anger as his excuse, he emitted a gruff ‘I think I’ll just go and have it out with him, if you don’t mind’ and the next thing he knew, he had thrust the hats into her arms and was storming back along the towpath with his walking stick and, ignoring the ancient DANGER notice, clattering over the rickety footbridge and through a spinney of birches to the lower end of Bailey’s Meadow; then over a stile into a pool of mud and fast up the hillside, only to see below him the Arts and Crafts marquee half collapsed and the exhibitors, with more energy than they’d shown all day, dismantling tents, stands and trestle tables and slinging them into their vans: and there among the vans, the space, the very space, which only half an hour earlier Jeb’s van had occupied and now occupied no more.

Which didn’t for a second prevent Kit from loping down the slope with his arms waving in false jocularity:

‘Jeb! Jeb! Where the hell’s Jeb? Anyone seen Jeb at all, the leather chap? Gone off before I could pay him, silly ass – bunch of his money in my pocket! Well, do you know where Jeb’s gone? And you don’t either?’ – in a string of vain appeals as he scoured the line of vans and trucks.

But all he got for an answer were kindly smiles and shakes of the head: no, Kit, sorry, nobody knows where Jeb’s gone, or where he lives for that matter, or what his other name is, come to think of it, Jeb’s a loner, civil enough but not by any means what you’d call chatty – laughter. One exhibitor thought she’d seen him over to Coverack Fair a couple of weeks back; another said she remembered him from St Austell last year. But nobody had a surname for him, nobody had a phone number, or even a number plate. Most likely he’d done what other traders do, they said: spotted the ad, bought his trading ticket at the gate, parked, traded and moved on.

‘Lost someone, have you, Dad?’

Emily, right beside him – girl’s a bloody genie. Must have been gossiping with the stable girls behind the horseboxes.

‘Yes. I have actually, darling. Jeb, the leather-maker chap. The one your mum bought a bag from.’

‘What does he want?’

‘Nothing. I do’ – confusion overcoming him – ‘I owe him money.’

‘You paid him. Sixty quid. In twenties.’

‘Yes, well, this was for something else’ – shiftily, avoiding her eye. ‘Settlement of an old debt. Different thing entirely’ – then, babbling something about needing to ‘have a word with Mum’, barged his way back along the path and through the walled garden to the kitchen, where Suzanna, with Mrs Marlow’s help, was chopping vegetables in preparation for this evening’s dinner for the Chain Gang. She ignored him, so he sought sanctuary in the dining room.

‘Think I’ll just buff up the silver,’ he announced, loud enough for her to hear and do something about him if she wanted.

But she didn’t, so never mind. Yesterday he had done a great job of polishing the commander’s collection of antique silver – the Paul Storr candlesticks, the Hester Bateman salts, and the silver corvette complete with decommissioning pennant presented by the officers and crew of his last command. Bestowing a cheerless flap of the silver cloth on each, he poured himselfa large Scotch, stomped upstairs and sat at the desk in his dressing room as a preliminary to performing his next chore of the evening: seating cards.

In the normal way, these cards were a source of quiet gratification to him, since they were his official calling cards left over from his last foreign posting. It was his little habit to look on surreptitiously as one or other of his dinner guests turned over the card, ran a finger across the embossed lettering and read the magic words: Sir Christopher Probyn, High Commissioner of Her Majesty the Queen. Tonight he anticipated no such pleasure. Nevertheless, with the guest list before him and a whisky at his elbow, he went diligently – perhaps too diligently – to work.

‘That chap Jeb’s gone, by the way,’ he announced in a deliberately offhand voice, sensing Suzanna’s presence behind him in the doorway. ‘Upped sticks. Nobody knows who he is or what he is or anything else about him, poor man. All very painful. Very upsetting.’

Expecting a conciliatory touch or kindly word, he paused in his labours, only to have Jeb’s shoulder bag land with a thump on the desk in front of him.

‘Look inside, Kit.’

Tilting the open bag irritably towards him, he groped around until he felt the tightly folded page of lined notepaper on which Jeb had written his receipt. Clumsily, he opened it, and with the same shaky hand held it under the desk lamp:

To one innocent dead woman .............................nothing.

To one innocent dead child .............................nothing.

To one soldier who did his duty .............................disgrace.

To Paul .............................one knighthood.

Kit read it, then stared at it – no longer as a document but as an object of disgust. Then he flattened it on the desk among the place cards, and studied it again in case he had missed something, but he hadn’t.

‘Simply not true,’ he pronounced firmly. ‘The man’s obviously sick.’

Then he put his face in his hands and rolled it about, and after a while whispered, ‘Dear God.’


And who was Master Bailey when he was at home, if he ever was?

An honest Cornish son of our village, if you listened to the believers, a farmer’s boy unjustly hanged for stealing sheep on Easter Day for the pleasure of a wicked Assize judge over to Bodmin.

Except Master Bailey, he was never really hanged, or not to death he wasn’t, not according to the famous Bailey Parchment in the church vestry. The villagers were so incensed by the unjust verdict that they cut him down at dead of night, they did, and resuscitated him with best applejack. And seven days on, young Master Bailey, he did take his father’s horse and rode over to Bodmin, and with one sweep of his scythe he did chop the head clean off of that same wicked judge, and good luck to him, my dove – or so they do tell you.

All drivel, according to Kit the amateur historian who, in a few idle hours, had amused himself by researching the story: sentimental Victorian hogwash of the worst sort, not a scrap of supporting evidence in local archives.

The fact remained that for the last however many years, come rain or shine, peace or war, the good people of St Pirran had joined together to celebrate an act of extrajudicial killing.


The same night, lying in wakeful estrangement beside his sleeping wife and assailed by feelings of indignation, self-doubt and honest concern for an erstwhile companion-at-arms who, for whatever reason, had fallen so low, Kit deliberated his next move.

The night had not ended with the dinner party: how could it? After their spat in the dressing room, Kit and Suzanna barely had time to change before the Chain Gang’s cars were rolling punctually up the drive. But Suzanna had left him in no doubt that hostilities would be resumed later.

Emily, no friend of formal functions at the best of times, had bowed out for the evening: some shindig in the church hall she thought she might look in on, and anyway, she didn’t have to be back in London till tomorrow evening.

At the dinner table, sharpened by the knowledge that his world was falling round his ears, Kit had performed superbly if erratically, dazzling the Lady Mayor to his right and the Lady Alderman to his left with set pieces about the life and travails of a Queen’s representative in a Caribbean paradise:

‘My accolade? Absolute fluke! Nothing whatever to do with merit. Parade-horse job. Her Maj was in the region and took it into her head to drop in on our local premier. It was my parish, so bingo, I get a K for being in the right place at the right time. And you, darling’ – grabbing his water glass by mistake and raising it to Suzanna down the line of the commander’s Paul Storr candlesticks – ‘became the lovely Lady P, which is how I’ve always thought of you anyway.’

But even while he makes this desperate protestation, it’s Suzanna’s voice, not his own, that he is hearing:

All I want to know is, Kit: did an innocent woman and child die, and were we packed off to the Caribbean to shut you up, and is that poor soldier right?

And sure enough, no sooner has Mrs Marlow gone home and the last of the Chain Gang’s cars departed, there Suzanna is, standing stock-still in the hall waiting for his answer.

And Kit must have been unconsciously composing it all through dinner, because out it pours like a Foreign Office spokesman’s official statement – and probably, to Suzanna’s ear, about as believable:

‘Here is my final word on the subject, Suki. It’s as much as I’m allowed to tell you, and probably a great deal more.’ Has he used this line before? ‘The top-secret operation in which I was privileged to be involved was afterwards described to me by its planners – at the highest level – as a certified, bloodless victory over some very bad men.’ A note of misplaced irony enters his voice which he tries in vain to stop: ‘And for all I know, yes, maybe my modest role in the operation was what secured our posting, since the same people were kind enough to say I had done a pretty decent job, but unfortunately a medal would be too conspicuous. However, that was not the reason given to me by Personnel when the posting was offered to me – a reward for lifelong service was how they sold it to me, not that I needed much selling – any more than you did, as I recall’ – pardonable dig. ‘Were the Personnel people – or Human Resources or whatever the hell they call themselves these days – aware of my role in a certain enormously delicate operation? I very much doubt it. My guess is, they didn’t even know the very little you know.’

Has he persuaded her? When Suzanna looks like this, anything can be going on. He becomes strident – always a mistake:

‘Look, darling, at the end of the day, who are you actually going to believe? Me and the top brass at the Foreign Office? Or some very sad ex-soldier down on his luck?’

She takes his question seriously. Weighs it. Her face locked against him, yes; but also blotchy, resolute, breaking his heart with its unbending rectitude, the face of a woman who got the best law degree of her year and never used it, but is using it now; the face of a woman who has looked death in the eye through a string of medical ordeals, and her only outward concern: how will Kit manage without her?

‘Did you ask them – these planners – whether it was bloodless?’

‘Of course I didn’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because with people like that you don’t challenge their integrity.’

‘So they volunteered it. In as many words? “The operation was bloodless” – just like that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘To reassure me, I assume.’

‘Or to deceive you.’

‘Suzanna, that is not worthy of you!’

Or not worthy of me? he wonders abjectly, first storming off to his dressing room in a huff, then sneaking unnoticed into his side of the bed where hour after hour he peers miserably into the half-darkness while Suzanna sleeps her motionless, medicated sleep: until at some point in the interminable dawn, he discovers that an unconscious mental process has delivered him a seemingly spontaneous decision.


Rolling silently off the bed and creeping across the corridor, Kit threw on a pair of flannels and a sports jacket, detached his cellphone from its charger and dropped it into his jacket pocket. Pausing at the door to Emily’s bedroom for sounds of waking, and hearing none, he tiptoed down the back staircase to the kitchen to make himself a pot of coffee, an essential prerequisite for putting his master plan into effect: only to hear his daughter’s voice addressing him from the open doorway leading to the orchard.

‘Got a spare mug on you, Dad?’

Emily, back from her morning run with Sheba.

At any other time, Kit would have relished a cosy chat with her: just not on this particular morning, though he was quick to sit himself opposite her at the pine table. As he did so, he caught sight of the purpose in her face and knew she had turned back from her run when she spotted the kitchen lights on her way up Bailey’s Hill.

‘Mind telling me what’s going on exactly, Dad?’ she enquired crisply, every bit her mother’s child.

‘Going on?’ – lame smile. ‘Why should anything be going on? Your mum’s asleep. I’m having a coffee.’

But nobody fobs off Emily. Not these days. Not after that scoundrel Bernard two-timed her.

‘What happened at Bailey’s yesterday?’ she demanded. ‘At the leather stall. You knew the man but you wouldn’t acknowledge him. He called you Paul and left some foul note in Mum’s handbag.’

Kit had long abandoned his attempts to penetrate the near-telepathic communications between his wife and daughter.

‘Yes, well, I’m afraid that’s not something you and I are able to discuss,’ he replied loftily, avoiding her eye.

‘And you’re not able to discuss it with Mum either. Right?’

‘Yes, it is right, Em, as it happens. And I’m not enjoying it any more than she is. Unfortunately, it’s a matter of considerable official secrecy. As your mother is aware. And accepts. As perhaps you should.’

‘My patients tell me their secrets. I don’t go handing them around. What makes you think Mum will hand yours around? She’s silent as the grave. A bit more silent than you are sometimes.’

Time to mount his high horse:

‘Because these are state secrets, Emily. Not mine and not your mother’s. They were entrusted to me and no one else. The only people I can share them with are the people who know them already. Which makes it, I have to say, rather a lonely business.’

And on this fine note of self-pity, he rose, kissed her on the head, stalked off across the stable yard to his improvised office, locked the door and opened up his computer:

Marlon will respond to your personal and confidential inquiries.


With Sheba riding proudly in the back of the nearly new Land Rover that he had acquired in exchange for his aged camper, Kit drives purposefully up Bailey’s Hill until he arrives by design at a deserted lay-by with a Celtic cross and a view of the morning mist rising in the valley. His first call is foredoomed, as he intends it to be, but Service ethic and some sense of self-protection requires him to make it. Dialling the Foreign Office switchboard, he gets a determined woman who requires him to repeat his name clearly and slowly. He does, and throws in his knighthood for good measure. After a delay so long that he would be justified in ringing off, she informs him that the erstwhile minister Mr Fergus Quinn has not been at his post for three years – a thing Kit well knows but this doesn’t stop him from asking – and that she has no number for him and no authority to pass messages. Would Sir Christopher – finally, thank you! – care to be connected with the resident clerk? No thank you, Sir Christopher would not, with the clear implication that a resident clerk wouldn’t match up to the level of security involved.

Well, I tried, and it’s on record. Now for the tricky bit.

Extracting the piece of paper on which he had written down Marlon’s telephone number, he touches it into his cellphone, turns the volume to maximum because his hearing’s going a bit, and swiftly, for fear of hesitation, presses green. Listening tensely to the number ringing out, he remembers too late what time of day it is in Houston, and has a vision of a bleary Marlon groping for his bedside phone. Instead, he gets the sincere voice of a Texan matron:

‘We thank you for calling Ethical Outcomes. Remember: at Ethical, your safety comes first!’

Then a blast of martial music, and the all-American voice of Marlon on parade:

‘Hullo! This is Marlon. Kindly be advised that your inquiry will always be treated in the strictest confidence in accordance with Ethical’s principles of integrity and discretion. I’m sorry: there’s nobody around just now to take your personal and private call. But if you would care to leave a simple message of no more than two minutes in duration, your confidential consultant will get right back to you. After the signal, please.’

Has Kit prepared his simple message of no more than two minutes in duration? During the long night, he evidently has:

‘This is Paul and I need to speak to Elliot. Elliot, this is Paul, from three years ago. Something pretty unpleasant has cropped up, not of my making, I may say. I need to talk to you urgently, obviously not on my home number. You’ve got my personal cellphone number, it’s the same old one as before, not encrypted, of course. Let’s fix a date to meet as soon as possible. If you can’t make it, perhaps you’d put me in touch with somebody I’m authorized to talk to. I mean by that somebody who knows the background and can fill in some rather disturbing blanks. I look forward to hearing from you very soon. Thank you. Paul.’

With a sense of a tricky job well done in under two minutes, he rings off and sets out along a pony track with Sheba at his heels. But after a couple of hundred yards his sense of achievement deserts him. How long will he have to wait before anyone calls back? And, above all, where will he wait? In St Pirran there’s no cellphone signal – you can be on Orange, Vodafone or whatever. If he goes home now, all he’ll be thinking of will be how to get out again. Obviously, in due course he will be offering his womenfolk some unclassified account of what he’s achieved – but not until he’s achieved it.

So the question is: is there a middle way, a stopgap cover story that will keep him within range of Marlon but out of range of his women? Answer: the tedious solicitor in Truro he recently engaged to sort out various piddling family trusts. Suppose, for argument’s sake, something has cropped up: a knotty legal matter that needs to be thrashed out in a hurry? And suppose Kit in the rush of events has completely forgotten all about the appointment till now? It plays. Next move, call Suzanna, which will take nerve, but he’s ready for her.

Summoning Sheba, he returns to the Land Rover, slots his cellphone into its housing, switches on the ignition and is startled by the deafening shriek of an incoming call on maximum sound.

‘Is that Kit Probyn?’ a male voice blurts.

‘This is Probyn. Who’s that?’ – hastily adjusting the volume.

‘My name’s Jay Crispin from Ethical. Heard marvellous things about you. Elliot’s off the radar at the moment, a-chasing the deer, as we say. How’s about I stand in for him?’

Within seconds, as it seems to him, the thing is settled: they will meet. And not tomorrow but tonight. No beating about the bush, no umming and ahhing. A forthright British voice, educated, one of us, and not in the least defensive, which of itself speaks volumes. The kind of man that in other circumstances it would be a pleasure to get to know – all of which he duly reported to Suzanna in suitably coded terms while they hurriedly dressed him in time to catch the ten forty-one from Bodmin Parkway station:

‘And you’ll be strong, Kit,’ Suzanna urged him, embracing him with all the power in her frail body. ‘It’s not that you’re weak. You’re not. It’s that you’re kind and trusting and loyal. Well, Jeb was loyal too. You said he was. Didn’t you?’

Did he? Probably he did. But then, as he reminded her sagely, people do change, darling, even the best of us, you know. And some of us go clean off the rails.

‘And you’ll ask your Mister Big, whoever he is, straight out: “Was poor Jeb telling the truth and did an innocent woman and her child die?” I don’t want to know what it’s about. I know I never shall. But if what Jeb wrote on that beastly receipt is true, and that’s why we got the Caribbean, we must face up to it. We can’t live a lie, however much we might like to. Can we, darling? Or I can’t,’ she added, as an afterthought.

And from Emily, more baldly, as they pulled into the station forecourt:

‘Whatever it is, Dad, Mum’s going to need proper answers.’

‘Well, so am I!’ he had snapped back at her in a moment of angry pain that he instantly regretted.


The Connaught Hotel in the West End of London was not an establishment that had come Kit’s way but, seated alone amid the bustle of waiters in the post-modern splendour of its lounge, he rather wished it had; for in that case he would not have chosen the elderly country suit and cracked brown shoes that he had snatched from his wardrobe.

‘If my plane’s late, just tell ’em you’re waiting for me, and they’ll look after you,’ Crispin had said, without troubling to mention where his plane was coming from.

And sure enough, when Kit murmured Crispin’s name to the black-suited major-domo poised like a great conductor at his lectern, the fellow had actually smiled:

‘Come a long way today, have we, Sir Christopher? Well, Cornwall, that is a long way. What may I tempt you with, compliments of Mr Crispin?’

‘Pot of tea, and I’ll pay for it myself. Cash,’ Kit had retorted stiffly, determined to retain his independence.

But a cup of tea is not something the Connaught gives up lightly. To obtain one, Kit must settle for the Chic & Shock Afternoon Tea and look on helplessly while a waiter brings cakes, scones and cucumber sandwiches at thirty-five pounds plus tip.

He waits.

Several potential Crispins enter, ignore him, join others or are joined by them. From the strong, masterful voice he has heard on the telephone, he instinctively looks for the man to match it: big-shouldered perhaps, bags of confidence, a good stride. He remembers Elliot’s glowing eulogy of his employer. He wonders to himself in nervous jest what earthly form such powers of leadership and charisma will take. And he is not entirely disappointed when an elegant forty-something man of medium height, wearing a well-cut grey pinstripe suit, sits himself quietly down beside him, takes his hand and murmurs, ‘I rather think I’m your man.’

And the recognition, if such it could be called, is immediate. Jay Crispin is as English and smooth as his voice. He is clean-shaven and, with his groomed, swept-back head of healthy hair and smile of quiet assurance, what Kit’s parents would have called clean-limbed.

‘Kit, I’m just so very sorry that this should have happened,’ the perfectly tuned voice declares, with a sincerity that cuts straight to Kit’s heart. ‘What a bloody awful time you’ve had. My God, what are you drinking – not tea!’ And as a waiter glides to their side: ‘You’re a whisky man. They do a pretty decent Macallan here. Take all this stuff away, will you, Luigi? And bring us a couple of the eighteen-year-olds. Make ’em big ’uns. Ice? – no ice. Soda and water on the side.’ And as the waiter departs: ‘And look here, thanks a million for making the trip. I’m just so terribly sorry you had to make it at all.’


Now Kit would never admit that he was attracted to Jay Crispin, or that his judgement was in any way undermined by the man’s compelling charm. From the outset, he would insist, he had harboured the gravest suspicions about the fellow, and kept them going throughout the meeting.

‘And life in darkest Cornwall suits you all right, does it?’ Crispin asked conversationally while they waited for their drinks to arrive. ‘You don’t pine for the bright lights? Personally, I’d be talking to the dicky birds after a couple of weeks. But that’s my problem, they tell me. Incurable workaholic. No powers of self-entertainment.’ And after this little confidence: ‘And Suzanna on the mend, I gather?’ – dropping the perfect voice for intimacy.

‘Vastly better, thank you, vastly. Country life is what she loves,’ Kit replied awkwardly, but what else is he supposed to say when the man asks? And gruffly, in an effort to turn the conversation round:

‘So where are you actually based? Here in London or – well, Houston, I suppose?’

‘Oh my God, London, where else? Only place to be, if you want my view – apart from North Cornwall, obviously.’

The waiter was back. Hiatus while he poured out the drinks to Crispin’s specification.

‘Cashews, bits?’ Crispin asked Kit solicitously. ‘Or something a bit more substantial after your travels?’

‘Thank you, I’m doing very well’ – keeping his guard up.

‘Shoot away, then,’ said Crispin when the waiter had left.

Kit shot. And Crispin listened, his handsome face puckered in concentration, his neat head wisely nodding to imply he was familiar with the story; even that he’d heard it before.

‘And then, the same evening, there was this, you see,’ Kit protested and, drawing a damp brown envelope from the recesses of his country suit, passed Crispin the piece of flimsy lined paper that Jeb had torn from his pad. ‘Take a look at that, if you will,’ he added, for extra portent – and watched Crispin’s manicured hand take it over, noting the double cuffs of cream silk and the gold engraved links; watched him lean back and, holding the paper in both hands, scrutinize it with the calm of an antiquarian examining it for watermarks.

Well, did he look guilty, darling? Did he look shocked? Well, he must have looked something!

But Crispin, so far as Kit could make out, didn’t look anything. The regular features didn’t flinch, there was no violent trembling of the hands: just a forlorn shake of the trim head, accompanied by the officer-class voice.

‘Well, you poor chap is all I can say, Kit. You absolute poor chap. What a truly bloody awful situation. And your poor Suzanna too. Ghastly. What she must be going through, God alone knows. I mean, she’s the one who really took the flak. Quite apart from not knowing why or where it’s coming from, and knowing she can’t ask. What a little shit. Forgive me. Christ!’ he said vehemently under his breath, suppressing some stab of inner pain.

‘And she really needs to get a straight answer,’ Kit insisted, determined to stick to his guns. ‘However bad it is, she’s got to know what happened. So have I. She’s taken it into her head that our posting to the Caribbean was a way of shutting me up. She even – totally unintentionally – seems to have infected our daughter with the same idea. So not a very pleasant insinuation, as you can imagine’ – cautiously encouraged by Crispin’s sympathetic nod – ‘not a very happy way to go into retirement: reckoning you’ve done a decent job for your country, then discovering it was all a charade to cover up a – well – murder, not to put too fine an edge on it’ – pausing for a waiter to bustle past pushing a trolley bearing a birthday cake with a single candle sparking on it. ‘Then throw in the fact that a first-class soldier has had his whole life trashed for him, or may have done. That’s not the sort of thing Suzanna takes lightly, seeing she tends to care rather more about other people than she does about herself. So what I’m saying is: no beating around the bush, we need to have the facts. Yes or no. Straight out. Both of us. All of us. Anyone would. Sorry about that.’

Sorry how? Sorry to hear his voice slither out of control and feel the colour surge to his face? Not sorry at all. His dander was up at last, and so it should be. Suki would be cheering him on. So would Em. And the sight of this fellow Jay Crispin, smugly nodding away with his pretty head of wavy hair, would have infuriated them quite as much as it was starting to infuriate him.

‘Plus I’m the villain of the piece,’ Crispin suggested nobly, in the tone of a man assembling the case against him. ‘I’m the bad guy who set the whole thing up, hired a bunch of cheap mercs, conned Langley and our own Special Forces into providing support-in-aid and presided over one of the great operational f*ck-ups of all time. That right? Plus I delegated the job to a useless field commander who lost his rag and let his men shoot the hell out of an innocent mother and her child. Does that about cover it, or is there anything else I did that I haven’t mentioned?’

‘Now look here, I didn’t say any of that –’

‘No, Kit, you don’t have to. Jeb said it, and you believe it. You don’t have to sweeten it. I’ve lived with it for three years, and I can live with it for another three’ – all without a hint of self-pity, or none that reached Kit’s ear. ‘And Jeb’s not the only one, to be fair on him. In my line of country we get ’em all: chaps with post-traumatic stress disorder, real or imagined, resentment about gratuities, pensions, fantasizing about themselves, reinventing their life stories, and rushing to a lawyer if they’re not muzzled in time. But this little bastard is in a class of his own, believe you me.’ A forbearing sigh, another sad shake of the head. ‘Done great work in his day, Jeb, none better. Which only makes it worse. Plausible as the day is long. Heart-breaking letters to his MP, the Ministry of Defence, you name it. The poison dwarf, we call him at head office. Well, never mind.’ Another sigh, this one near silent. ‘And you’re absolutely sure the meeting was coincidence? He didn’t track you down somehow?’

‘Pure coincidence,’ Kit insisted, with more certainty than he was beginning to feel.

‘Did your local newspaper or radio down in Cornwall announce that Sir Christopher and Lady Probyn would be gracing the platform, by any chance?’

‘May have done.’

‘Maybe that’s your clue.’

‘No way,’ Kit retorted adamantly. ‘Jeb didn’t know my name until he showed up at the Fayre and put two and two together’ – glad to keep up the indignation.

‘So no pictures of you anywhere?’

‘None that came our way. And if there had been, Mrs Marlow would have told us. Our housekeeper,’ he declared stoutly. And for extra certainty: ‘And if she did miss something, the whole village would be telling her.’

The waiter wanted to know whether they would like the same again. Kit said he wouldn’t. Crispin said they would and Kit didn’t argue.

‘Want to hear something about our line of work at all, Kit?’ Crispin asked, when they were alone again.

‘Not sure I should, really. Not my business.’

‘Well, I think you should. You did a great job in the Foreign Office, no question. You worked your backside off for the Queen, earned your pension and your K. But as a first-rate civil servant you were an enabler – all right, a bloody good one. You were never a player. Not what we might call a hunter-gatherer in the corporate jungle. Were you? Admit it.’

‘Don’t think I know where you’re leading,’ Kit growled.

‘I’m talking incentive,’ Crispin explained patiently. ‘I’m talking about what drives the average Joe Bloggs to get out of bed in the morning: money, filthy lucre, dosh. And in my business – never yours – who gets a piece of the cake when an operation is as successful as Wildlife was. And the sort of resentments that are aroused. To the point where chaps like Jeb think they’re owed half the Bank of England.’

‘You seem to have forgotten that Jeb was army,’ Kit broke in hotly. ‘British army. He also had a bit of a thing about bounty-hunters, as he happened to inform me during our time together. Tolerated them, but that was as much as he could manage. He was proud of being the Queen’s soldier, and that was enough for him. Made the very point, I’m afraid. Sorry about that’ – getting hotter still.

Crispin was gently nodding to himself, like a man whose worst fears have been confirmed.

‘Oh dear. Oh Jeb. Oh boy. He actually said that, did he? God-a-mercy!’ He collected himself. ‘The Queen’s soldier doesn’t hold with mercenaries, but wants a mega-slice of the bounty-hunters’ cake? I love it. Well done, Jeb. Hypocrisy hits new depths. And when he doesn’t get what he wants, he turns round and shits all over Ethical’s doorstep. What a two-faced little’ – but for reasons of delicacy he preferred to leave the sentence unfinished.

And again Kit refused to be deterred:

‘Now look here, all that’s beside the point. I haven’t got my answer, have I? Nor has Suzanna.’

‘To what, exactly, old boy?’ Crispin asked, still struggling to overcome whatever demons were assailing him.

‘The answer I came for, damn it. Yes or no? Forget rewards, bounty, all that stuff. Total red herring. My question is, one: was the operation bloodless or was it not? Was anybody killed? And if so, who were they? Never mind about innocent or guilty: were they killed? And two’ – no longer quite the master of his arithmetic, but persisting nonetheless – ‘was a woman killed? And was her child killed? Or any child, for that matter? Suzanna has a right to know. So’ve I. And we both need to know what to tell our daughter, because Emily was there too. At the Fayre. Heard him. Heard things that she shouldn’t have done. From Jeb. Not her fault that she heard them but she did. I’m not sure how much, but enough.’ And as a mitigating afterthought, because his parting words to Emily at the railway station still shamed him: ‘Earwigging, probably. I don’t blame her. She’s a doctor. She’s observant. She needs to know things. Part of her job.’

Crispin appeared surprised, even a little hurt, to discover that such questions should still be out there on the table. But he elected to answer them anyway:

‘Let’s just take a look at your case first, Kit, shall we?’ he suggested kindly. ‘D’you honestly think the dear old FO would have given you that posting – that honour – if there’d been blood all over the Rock? Not to mention Punter singing his heart out to his interrogators at an undisclosed location?’

‘Could have done,’ Kit said obstinately, ignoring the outsider’s hated use of FO. ‘To keep me quiet. Get me out of the firing line. Stop me from blabbing. The Foreign Office has done worse things in its time. Suzanna thinks they could, anyway. So do I.’

‘Then watch my lips.’

From under furrowed brows, Kit was doing just that.

‘Kit. There was zero – repeat: zero – loss of life. Want me to say it again? Not one drop of blood, not anyone’s. No dead babies, no dead mothers. Convinced now? Or do I have to ask the concierge to bring a Bible?’


The walk from the Connaught to Pall Mall on that balmy spring evening was for Kit less a pleasure than a sad celebration. Jeb, poor fellow, was obviously very damaged goods indeed. Kit’s heart went out to him: a former comrade, a brave ex-soldier who had given in to feelings of avarice and injustice. Well, he’d known a better man than that, a man to respect, a man to follow. Should their paths happen to cross again – which God forbid, but should they – he would not withhold the hand of friendship. As to their chance meeting at Bailey’s Fayre, he had no time for Crispin’s base suspicions. It was sheer coincidence, and that was that. The greatest actor on earth couldn’t have faked that ravaged face as it stared up at him from the tailgate of the van. Jeb might be psychotic, he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or any of the other big words we throw around so easily these days. But to Kit he would remain the Jeb who had led him to the high point of his career, and nothing was ever going to take that away, period.

And it was with this determinedly honed formulation in his head that he stepped into a side street and called Suzanna, a thing he had been dying to do, but also in some indefinable way dreading, ever since he had left the Connaught.

‘Things are really good, Suki’ – picking his words carefully because, as Emily had unkindly pointed out, Suzanna was if anything more security conscious than he was. ‘We’re dealing with a very sick chap who’s tragically lost his way in life and can’t tell truth from fiction, okay?’ He tried again. ‘Nobody – repeat: nobody – got hurt in the accident. Suki? Are you there?’

Oh Christ, she’s crying. She’s not. Suki never cries.

‘Suki, darling, there was no accident. None plural. It’s all right. No child left behind. Or mother. Our friend from the Fayre is deluded. He’s a poor, brave chap, he’s got mental problems, he’s got money problems, and he’s all muddled up in his head. I’ve had it straight from the top man.’

‘Kit?’

‘What is it, darling? Tell me. Please. Suzanna?’

‘I’m all right, Kit. I was just a bit tired and low. I’m better now.’

Still not weeping? Suki? Not on your life. Not old Suki. Never. He had been intending to call Emily next, but on reflection: best give it a rest till tomorrow.


In his club, it was the watering hour. Old buddies greeted him, bought him a jar, he bought one back. Kidneys and bacon at the long table, coffee and port in the library to make a proper night of it. The lift out of service, but he negotiated the four flights with ease and groped his way down the long corridor to his bedroom without knocking over any bloody fire extinguishers. But he had to run his hand up and down the wall to find the light switch that kept eluding him, and while he was groping he noticed there was a lot of fresh air in the room. Had the previous occupant, in flagrant contradiction of club rules, been smoking and left the window open to conceal the evidence? If so, Kit was minded to write a stiff letter to the secretary.

And when eventually he did find the switch, and put on the light, there on a Rexine-covered armchair beneath the open window, wearing a smart dark-blue blazer with a triangle of white handkerchief in the top pocket, sat Jeb.